


something died within a soul

by kbirb



Series: going down fighting [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Fake Character Death, Human Experimentation, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Murder, Psychological Torture, Sadism, Starvation, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, Torture, white torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:08:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28473696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kbirb/pseuds/kbirb
Summary: What if Merrick had gotten the family: a torture fic.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: going down fighting [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2085570
Comments: 20
Kudos: 54





	1. cruel world

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kh530](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kh530/gifts).



> I'm sorry.

White. 

White. 

So much fucking white that Nicky can hardly breathe. He wants to break through the restraints, tear down the walls separating him from his love, but he can’t find a way. How long until they let him hold Joe in his arms once more? How long until they bore themselves with this mental torture and go back to physically tearing them apart to watch them heal? Are they testing what immortality can do to a broken heart or are they simply this sadistic?

His eyes are burning but he cannot look away from the screen. And even if he did, there would just be another screen facing him. That was Nicky’s torture; to see his love, reflected on many screens surrounding Nicky, and losing his grasp on reality in tandem with him. He did not know how many days had passed; he could only count the meals they’d given him without knowing how often they were feeding him. Were they providing them with regular meals or were they stretching it out, seeing how long they could go? 

They wouldn’t allow him to see his family, and hardly spoke to him when they delivered his meals. He’d spoken to one person, the kid, with sorrow in her eyes but a resolve that she was doing the right thing.

He’d seen Joe die too, not just sit in his loneliness. He’d refuse the meals given to him until he died from starvation, in the early days, and later on… he’d do more. Nicky couldn’t always hear Joe, but they made sure to turn on the sound when they’d shoot him. They’d bring him bad news and turn on the sound long enough for Nicky to hear the strangled “no” escape Joe’s lips. Those were the times when Joe would truly give up.

Nicky wondered if he was killing himself just to feel some sort of different pain.

The most fucked up part of it all wasn’t, as far as Nicky was concerned, that he was alone. It wasn’t even that he was being tortured. It was that they knew they could hurt him through Joe. It was that he was watching his love’s spark fade, his soul die each passing minute that he was alone. Watching him starve himself, watching him  _ kill _ himself when it got to be too much. The hardest thing was watching Joe become convinced that this reality they’d created was  _ the truth _ and watching the muddled confusion in his eyes as he gave up the fight.

Or so Nicky thought.

\---

Joe didn’t know how long it had been. Here is what he knew: everything was white and nothing was real. And Nicky was separated from him. 

  
The walls were white. The floor was white. The lights were an obnoxious and fluorescent white. The food was bland, devoid of flavor and color. He never knew when someone would approach because their footfalls were quiet, despite his keen senses. There was nothing. No color, no sound, nothing except for the gentle slide of a food tray pushed through the door.

No visible exits, he’d searched endlessly at first.

He didn’t know how long it had been.

To say there was no sound was a lie. There was sound. His sobs, when they broke him. His bones, when he broke them. The hiss of gas when they decided to knock him out.

The worst sound was the click of the door unlocking. When your senses are deprived, a sound like that feels like a bullet. If the door was opening, it meant someone was coming in. 

His favorite sound was a second click because it meant they were bored and would shoot him. It was nice to die, to feel that pain. He inflicted it on himself just to feel it, when they hadn’t let him feel in what felt like ages.

The next worst sound was the drag of a chair. It was always a grating metal sound and it meant one thing: that they wanted to talk. Talking was the hardest part. Talking meant news and lies that muddles his brain.

So far, they hadn’t tried to get any information out of him. He figured out early on that, if the point of this white room was to break him, that they wanted him fully gone before they drew that information from him. They’d already learned it wasn’t easy to break his family. Well, most of them anyway.

They also knew from the start that, eventually, Joe and his family could die. Booker’d given that up quickly, when he thought they might lose Andy. Those stakes were too high for his traitorous brother.

Joe knew, logically, that they were giving him pieces of false information to drive him mad. He’d been around too long to be that dense. But the problem was… When you have nothing but empty space and silence around you, reality begins to bend  _ just  _ enough for you to believe anything.

They made sure to give him kernels of truth. Videos of the others being tortured and coming back to life, too real to fake. He knew, because some were videos of the new immortal.

He hadn’t met her yet. The others had, because he saw their faces reflected in his dreams. Merrick had gotten to Nile Freeman before his team had; captured her and began to poke and prod at her in a German facility before gathering the rest of them up for experimentation. In the name of science, of course. Everything companies like them did was in the name of a better future for humanity. The funny thing was, well, keeping them in here was doing the opposite.

But he was seeing her in his dreams, which meant he had evidence for the things they told him. He would feel them break each of her fingers and wake up to video evidence of the same scene. Felt them slit her throat, a mockery of her death, and then a photo would be pushed through the same slot as his food. She must have told them that she was dreaming of him, too, and likely about the others before. Maybe she’d helped them track his family, unwittingly given up information, thinking they were trying to help her find the answers to why she’d come back to life.

Joe had plenty of time for speculation. He tried not to sleep, tried to die from exhaustion and starvation, tried not to witness more horrors than he needed to.

The first time he saw any of them in person was when they’d callously thrown Andy’s body in front of him. He’d lost track by now of time, meals given to him too sporadically to create any true schedule. But the telltale click of a door had broken through his isolation and he’d tensed waiting to hear what the next sound would be. The anticipation was crushing.

Instead, there was a thud and it felt as though the room was tipped upside down, air sucked out and gravity crushing him. She looked so… human in her death. He thought of his sister as a goddess sometimes and yet there she was, broken and gone in front of him, unmoving. 

Bruises mottled her skin, unhealing cuts lining her arms. Joe hadn’t imagined they’d truly kill her, hadn’t thought Booker could ever allow it. Joe scrambled to her side, his hardly-used voice cracking as he cried out for her. Clutching at her wrist, he’d begged for a pulse but felt nothing. He knew that there were drugs and poisons that could replicate death by dulling a pulse, but her eyes looked glassed over and she was so mortal now. 

Joe did not know how long he clutched her body. He hoped that she would stir, that he would be proven wrong but she never did. Eventually, he had heard the hiss of gas.

When he came to, her body was gone.

\---

The worst day yet was the day they gave Joe Andy’s dead body. Nicky had struggled so hard against his bonds that his wrists had begun to bleed. He could hear his love’s broken sobs and returned them with his own strangled “no”s. He wanted to rip a hole in the reality they’d created and kiss Joe’s beautiful face and tell him they could recover.

Nicky learned later that Andy was not dead and that hurt more, somehow, than losing her forever. He could accept that her time had come. She’d made him promise when he was separated from her that he would accept it. 

He just needed Joe to know it wasn’t true. Nicky screamed it at the screens until he’d lost his voice, throat ragged from the effort. It was useless, a futile effort that only left him aching. They tested him to see how quickly his voice could recover.

“You’re evil,” he spat out, the moment he could.

The doctor had given him a pitying smile.

Andy’s fake death, it turned out, was not the worst they could do. That came the day they knocked Nicky out and he came to with a pounding headache hours later. In the white room, Joe sat in the dead middle. Except the room wasn’t pure white anymore; there was blood and it was everywhere. Nicky felt his heart rate accelerate and he searched the screen for injuries on his love. Blood was crusted on his head and hands, which were tangled in his curly brown hair, overgrown now. He was tugging at the roots, tears streaming down his face, and rocking. Nicky had never seen Joe so broken.

But why? Why hadn’t they let him see? Where was the blood from and how had they ruined his lover so completely?

He squinted at the screen, trying to make out the words Joe’s lips were forming as he mumbled to himself. Sometimes, they would zoom in on his face. He wished, for the first time, that there was sound during this broken moment.

When he finally was able to focus, he felt his heart shatter in his chest. Could he truly die from a broken heart? He knew that word, had heard it whispered lovingly in his ear for centuries.

\---

Joe did not know what measure of time passed between Andy and Nicky’s deaths. His sister’s mortality, confirmed in her lifeless body, had sent his mind into dark corners that he could simply not find the will to crawl out of. If Andromache of Scythia could die a mortal death after thousands of years of warrior prowess, they all could meet their end. Was he to be like Quynh, to be tortured for centuries, unable to stop himself from breaking? Or would he be like Lykon, who died so early?

Would Nicky?

When would his beloved meet his mortality?

It was all he could think of, his will to continue on waxing and waning as time passed. Sometimes, he was determined to survive, to prove to them he was unbreakable so they might end his torture and allow him to hold Nicolò in his arms once again. Other times, he was determined to die, to give in to a mortality fate had yet to grant him, so that he might be gone before he knew a life without his love in it.

Fate was far too cruel for that. Merrick was as well.

Andy’s death had pushed him over the edge, causing his grip on reality to slip from his hands so quickly. The information they were feeding him now felt so strange. When he slept, it was dreamless, yet he could not recall meeting Nile Freeman… so why could he not conjure up those images? Was she brought in, during one of the phases of dissociation his now breaking brain was falling into as a form of self-preservation? Could it count as a meeting, if Joe could not remember it?

Why was he not dreaming?

He died, a few times, though not by them. Joe had been alive long enough to learn ways to kill oneself without a weapon. Without so much as a deliberately swallowed chunk of food. Knew how to break metal and what veins to sever. When you were as beaten down as he felt, your body wouldn’t fight back.

Then they delivered him the body. Not Andy’s again.

The pain that ripped through him in that moment was like that of a thousand bullets. Once, when they were enemies, Nicolò had arranged to have Yusuf drawn and quartered. That was some of the worst pain Joe had ever felt. This pain, however? This pain was that in multitudes.

If this was a replica, a clone, they’d gotten him down to every last mole on his body. Joe would know. He tore the clothes off of Nicky’s corpse and searched every inch of him in the time they gave him. He begged for a pulse, just like he had with Andy. Because while he knew she was mortal, had even tried to figure out how long they could have faked a death in her body, they couldn’t  _ do _ that to Nicky. Not unless… Not unless mortality had found him.

Merrick was capable of great things. Great things are not always good things; great can be the size of a horrible action. The color that pulsed through Nicky’s veins was the neon color of a poison Joe had never seen. And when he could not find a pulse, could not shake his love awake, he felt his will to live shatter without him. The sound that escaped him was inhuman.

When they came to take the body away, he fought back for the first time since the very beginning. His immortal body, constantly healing, could not truly be weakened and he fought like a feral beast. His nails gouged into eyes, his hands found necks to break, and the rage was intoxicating.

The rage was also blinding. He did not hear the gun until it was too late. 

When he came to, his perfect white room was stained with blood. They’d clearly quickly cleared out and all Joe could do was break further. This was it for him, what was the point of living? He felt himself curl up, felt his hands grasp at his hair, felt the tug. Yet the movements all felt detached from himself. He was moving but he was still. He was speaking but he was silent. He was there but he was not. He was alive but at what cost?

All he could hear was his own hoarse voice in the empty room, repeating one word over and over.

_ “Habibi.” _


	2. muscle and bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I used to see beauty in people  
>  But now I see muscle and bones  
> You know I never wanted to hurt you  
> But I'm sorry, my friend, this is the end  
> So I'm saying my goodbyes  
> Goodbye to my good side  
> It only ever got me hurt  
> And I finally learned  
> It's a cruel, cruel world _
> 
> \- Cruel World by Phantogram
> 
> Also known as: what happened to Nile.

The moment the plane landed atop the Merrick building, Nile had breathed a deep sigh of relief. It seemed so foolish now, in the hindsight, but she’d been so genuinely…  _ convinced _ . Apparently immortality, or whatever it was, didn’t heal a blind sense of trust.

Because she was a Marine and they wouldn’t do that to her.

Or so she thought.

Nile’s thoughts had been nothing but clouded since the incident. Incident. That was a funny way to say that she’d killed a man who killed her as well. A funny way to say she’d lost her way for the only path she thought she’d stay on.

Once a Marine, always a Marine.

_ Semper fidelis. _

Nile was supposed to be a Marine until she died, which was… well something that had already happened. But she would always be known as a Marine, which was a small comfort. She knew they told her family she was dead, so they would know her as she was during her service, until the day she could tell them the truth. Once they had the answers to how she’d come back to life and healed so quickly, she could tell her mom and brother about it all.

Or so she thought.

There were no dreamless nights, not even when they’d pump her so full of drugs that she’d fall asleep quicker than she’d been able to before the events of Afghanistan. At first, if she wasn’t dreaming of the strangers who seemed to be searching for her (how she knew this, she could not understand), she would wake up grasping at her neck with tears streaming down her cheeks. The pain would feel so real, starbursts of color flaring in her eyes before she succumbed to death; seeing the man who killed her dying in front of her over and over again was never any better. The other dreams were even vaguer, of a woman drowning and coming back to life like Nile did. These dreams came less frequently than the others, more fragmented.

The experiments Merrick were performing on her were… strange. In the beginning, during the first few days, it seemed so standard and she’d felt relaxed in their care as they seemed to be truly searching for the answers she wanted. Vials of her blood, more than she’d ever seen taken, were being ferried away for testing. They’d taken marrow, too, in an attempt to better understand her genetic code. MRI scans and electrodes hooked up to her brain to study her day and night. 

They asked her a lot of questions, too. About her death. Injuries she’d obtained at a younger age and whether she’d always known. She answered everything honestly. No, she’d never healed that way. No, she’d never died before. No, she didn’t know what was happening, wasn’t that why she was here? They monitored her sleep and she told them about her dreams. Whenever she’d wake up gasping, Dr. Kozak would come running into the room to talk to her about it. She always seemed most interested in the dreams of strangers. Would ask if she’d seen any road signs or heard any conversations. Nile tried to explain it the best she could, even though she couldn’t understand the interest in the things her mind was making up.

But when the experiments changed, the sense of safety changed with it. 

Less than a week after being sent to the Merrick headquarters in London, Nile had awoken in a panic from a dream. It seemed as though the strangers, the people her subconscious had created, had moved from Germany to England. Following her, even though there was no way they could be  _ real _ . They felt close, even in her awakened state. The second thing she processed was that she was now tied down.

Nile struggled against the restraints but it was no use. As she fought, her wrists chafed and bled and healed over quickly. They hadn’t given her answers as to why or how this was happening and in this moment, she didn’t care. Something had changed in her treatment.

That’s when they began killing her. Began shooting her and when she’d come to, blinking through the blood, they’d be scribbling down times with morbid looks of fascination on their faces. They would inject her with poisons that made her veins glow, gas the room to see how long it took her to pass out. They weren’t torturing her, though being killed over and over again felt like its own form of cruelty. The poisons  _ hurt _ but they told her that they wanted to see how her body reacted to damage that was not just mutilation or quick death. It felt logical and yet it felt so wrong.

Shortly after these experiments began, Nile’s dreams changed. She still saw the strangers, who she’d accepted as real, but now they weren’t searching. They were in septic bright rooms that were achingly familiar to her. They were being  _ hurt _ , with their body parts mutilated in ways that had not (yet) been done to her. 

Was that her fault?

Were they like her?

Why else would she be dreaming of them?

Nile didn’t often beg… but she begged now for the answers she was seeking. She cried to a God she no longer knew if she believed in that these dreams would stop. She prayed for answers, she pleaded with the scientists to give her information. But they just kept killing her, taking small parts of her, breaking her down and promising her answers. The more they told her it was in the name of science, the less she believed it. She’d  _ wanted _ to help humanity and, more selfishly, she’d wanted to understand herself. Now, she wasn’t sure it would ever happen.

Until, one day, she woke up strapped to a new bed with the sound of more beeping machines filling a different room than before. The sound of a man screaming had been what startled her from her latest drug-induced sleep. Next to her was the woman she had seen her dreams, cheekbones sharp and dark hair cut short. She looked weaker than Nile expected and was laying still on her bed, still drugged. In the next bed over, a man with shaggy dust-brown hair was struggling against his binding, looking towards the doorway with a look of broken horror on his face.

And in the doorway, three security agents were pinning down another man. He was lithe compared to the man in the bed and he was screaming like a broken man, thrashing against the men holding him. He looked so weak compared to Nile’s dreams; in fact, she recognized the effects of a weakening drug they’d tested on her recently. Despite the drugs he was fighting like a lion caged and screaming in a language she did not understand. It seemed like Italian, maybe. 

When he was finally subdued by a gunshot directly between the eyes, Nile watched him come back to life before her very eyes. The man who’d shot him gave her a wicked grin before shooting him again. The man in the bed was whispering what sounded like apologies, though to who she could not be sure. 

The woman woke up just in time to see the broken man pulled away.

Nile would later learn their names. She would learn their stories, coming in pieces they deemed necessary to know. Andy was the woman in the bed next to hers. Andromache was her full name and she seemed like a fiery person, but she wouldn’t tell Nile anything about her, nor would she let Booker. Booker was the man in the next bed over, was over 200 years old and wanted nothing more than his booze (and apparently to give up). He told her that shortly before they’d come, Andy had lost her mortality. When he said it, Andy had yelled at him, but he’d insisted Nile needed to know. She would learn that Nicolò, Nicky as they called him now, had been fighting the men because his lover had been taken. They’d been together since the Crusades, had killed one another time and time again. Now they couldn’t bear to be apart.

Her dreams were quieter now. When she did dream, it was mainly Yusuf. Joe. Those dreams were quiet too. Just a white room and this horrible sense of a lack of self that would leave her feeling empty when she would wake up. Perhaps his pain was the most vivid or perhaps it was simply closer. 

And she’d dream of the drowning women still, too. Those dreams had always been separate from her dreams of the others, just had been less tangible. The woman was this rage-filled machine. All fury and psychosis, endlessly being unable to get in a breath. After those dreams, Nile would startle awake, feeling the pressure of the water still crushing her. Fingers aching like she was the one pounding against the metal.

When she asked Andy and Booker about her, they’d both shook their heads.

“Just a nightmare,” Andy told her. “It’s not the same as your dreams of Joe.”

Nile tried to tell them that these  _ felt _ real, the way her dreams of them had. The way her dreams of Joe did. She was hurting, she could feel the woman’s hurt. But Booker would tense up and change the subject. Andy would feign sleep, turning her back to Nile as best she could, being tied down.

She had more freedom than the others. They told her it was because she’d been compliant. They owed her for allowing their research, for being so key in creating the poisons and serums to help get the others. Nile was a part of something great: immortality and healing for humanity. Without her, the others would have been harder to capture. 

She learned Booker’s piece in it, too.

Nile felt the crushing guilt, daily, but she also hated Booker for his choice. Her actions had been unintentional. She had been tricked. He was a desperate, weak man. But she also saw the love in his eyes when he talked to Andy, when he talked about Nicky and Joe. It was complex, she guessed, but she hated him nonetheless.

She hated Merrick and herself, too. They'd take her to observe Nicky and Joe on cameras sometimes, showing her how "lucky" she was. 

“This is what happens to selfish people,” said the scrawny white CEO of the company, his beady eyes shining while he watched his people experiment on the others. His gaze cut to her. “We are sorry to hurt you, Corporal Freeman.” The sympathy in his voice was so  _ fake. _ “But your selflessness means you are not being punished, simply helping us.”

That ended that day they took her to meet Joe.

Even though Nile received more regular meals than the others, the days were still slipping in confusingways. On days that they killed her she would especially struggle to keep her grip on reality. 

She didn’t know how long Joe had been in his solitary confinement when they brought her to him.

“Hi,” she said quietly, nervously crouching down in front of him. He did not respond. Did not even blink, eyes staring glassily at a wall.

Nile tried again. “Hello, Joe? Yusuf? My name is Ni-”

His broken voice whispered “Andy? Are you alive?” and his blank expression seemed to falter for a moment. But when his empty eyes looked at her, seeming both to not process her and yet to understand, he fell flat again.

She tried to break through. She tried desperately to tell him Andy was alive, that she didn’t understand why he would think otherwise. That morning, they had taken Andy away… Realization dawned. They’d lied to him. Solitary could make you believe anything.

“Please, Joe, please… Listen to me! Listen. She’s alive. Andy is alive, I promise you this, she is just upstairs. Sleep tonight, please, dream of me, if that’s how this works, if you dream of me the way I dream of you…” Nile pleaded with the man, looking for any sign that he heard her. But nothing registered on his face, not even as her voice rose.

Suddenly the door behind her opened with a sharp crack and multiple men came in. She heard the gun click behind her, felt the pain blossom in her chest. Red bloomed out from her heart and as her consciousness slipped, she heard Merrick’s voice over her.

“I thought I told you to keep behaving,” he scolded. “You can’t be telling him these lies.”

Andy explained later that Joe would never dream of Nile again. That even though he was too broken to process that she was there, they’d met. It was deliberate. Joe wasn’t allowed to know Andy was alive, so they’d taken his connection.

Now Nile was branded troubled and selfish, like the others. Apparently, she’d tried to ruin their research on how much an immortal brain could break when she’d told Joe the truth. She’d just wanted to help him, didn’t understand how breaking someone’s mind would help unlock the secrets of immortality.

Now they were breaking her bones, cutting off her limbs, threatening her family.

The day they drowned her was the day Andy told her about Quynh. Nile came back soaking wet after spending three hours locked under water. Drowning over and over again… but drowning for 500 years sounded like a torture not even Merrick could conceive. The dreams made sense now. They'd been all she could dream about, having met the others, and now that she'd experienced the sensation first hand... They were even more breaking.

“Let’s hope they get us out of here before they think of it,” Booker whispered. The entire conversation had been in hushed voices, hoping the cameras couldn’t hear.

Nile wasn’t hopeful. No one knew they were here, at least no one who would care to help them. Her family thought she was dead, her company had turned her away, and the immortals didn’t have anyone outside of their circle. With all the work Merrick had done with Nile, they knew how to keep everyone just weak enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually wrote this almost right after writing chapter one because I knew I needed to explain what happened to Nile. I promise there will be a fix-it fic in this series, I just won't be the one writing it.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the song "Habibi" by Tamino.
> 
> This all came about for two reasons:  
> 1) I was researching torture for one of [Perry's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flowerparrish) fics  
> 2) Sam likes torture fics
> 
> If there are any tags I should add, please let me know!


End file.
